WTI Magazine #76    2016 February 15
Author : Giulia Carletti      Translation by:

Logic must not speak: visions must. The visionary art of de Chirico (1888-1978), known for his lonely mannequins and dreamlike atmospheres, is not a sterile attention to form, but a field of research for a revelation through it. "To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream." So the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico stated in 1913, in his On Mystery and Creation.

Born in Volos, Greece, from Italian parents – his father being a Sicilian railroad engineer and his mother a wealthy Genoan woman – de Chirico's art always aimed at an international artistic and cultural confrontation. As the inventor of Metaphysical painting, de Chirico would deeply inspire the Surrealist movement and – later – would fascinate artists like Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Pascali.

From a young age, he received an international education, thereby studying fine arts in Athens, Florence, and Munich and breathing the avant-garde atmosphere of Paris, in which he met Picasso and Apollinaire. In his paintings, de Chirico would always refer to the classical identity he inherited from his birthland, the land of myth and ancient gods: Greece. What de Chirico mostly admired of Munich - where he arrived in 1906 - was the city's undefinable profile, in which old Greek Temples spoke with high industrial chimneys, and which would shape his artistic imaginary forever. Munich was also the city that led him to read the texts by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and to admire the late-romantic art of Böcklin and Klinger – his first source of inspiration.

Existentialism – as the theorization of man's uncertainty, solitude, and anguish – brought his artistic research to focus upon man's ambiguous relationship to the world, shaping a symbolic and metaphysical reality. "Perhaps," he stated, "the most amazing sensation passed on to us by prehistoric man is that of presentiment [...] We might consider it as an eternal proof of the irrationality of the universe. Original man must have wandered through a world full of uncanny signs. He must have trembled at each step."

Even if de Chirico practiced Metaphysical painting since 1909, the Metafisica was officially born in 1917 – soon after the outbreak of the First World War – when de Chirico and the two artists de Pisis and Carrà (a former Futurist) met at the military hospital in Ferrara. It was thus a trauma that inspired his art. Such movement, in fact, was born as a spontaneous reaction to Futurism and its war-oriented art. In de Chirico's work, the silence of forms prevails over the noise of movement: he and Carrà looked at the masters of the Renaissance (such as Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello) as a sort of antidote to war's disintegration, making the Metafisica result in a counter-modernist trend.

If Munich gave de Chirico's paintings a philosophical structure, Florence and Rome (where he arrived in 1919) reinforced his paintings' classical imprint: plain forms and delicate colors of the Renaissance were added to ancient Greek epos, constructing a powerful corpus of "Mediterranean visions." During this period, de Chirico regularly visited museums and executed a number of pastiches of works of the Italian Masters of painting and architecture. In the mid-1920s, he began working on the Metaphysics of Light and Mediterranean Myth themes - archaeologists, horses, trophies, and gladiators started to invade his canvases. In these years, he also began his fierce battle against the innumerable falsifications of his painting.

The Metafisica anticipated somehow the Surrealist movement, by reporting odd juxtapositions of objects and memories onto the canvas. In de Chirico's case, such are the references to his father's work (the triangle, the work tools, the locomotives) and the views on the piazzas he remembered from Florence - Piazza Santa Croce inspired his The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon as seen from a first-floor window. 

However, after his solo show at Galerie Léonce Rosenberg, Surrealists heavily criticized his works, and, by this time, he totally broke up with the group. Later, the encounter with Albert C. Barnes, who would become an avid patron of his work, deeply helped the spreading of his art, which, in 1936, reached New York in an exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery.

What emerges from de Chirico's late paintings is a new combination of his traditional subjects. Italian Piazzas were now inhabited by mythological characters: this research is known as neo-Metaphysical Art.

Throughout his several artistic periods, de Chirico always maintained the combination of classical taste and modern anxiety, producing a powerful sense of misplacement. As the art critic Daverio writes, "For De Chirico, the artist was like a vaticinator, who leads people to understand matters that they would otherwise not understand."

Mannequins and toys-like objects, weird chromaticisms, and steep perspectives are distinctive elements of de Chirico's work, as well as signs that contributed to the making of a surreal atmosphere. However, such predominant elements as smoothed forms and color homogeneity appear to give a sense of balance and stability to the disorienting effect of his juxtapositions.

De Chirico's art revealed, somehow, how form was the only thing able to challenge the years of anguish through its stable nature. Even if a sense of disquiet is present as omen, classical images dive into a symbolism of forms: the condition of man is eternalized. De Chirico's visions aimed indeed at stimulating reasoning in the viewer, as in a symbolist painting: anxiety and harmony have never been so close in art history. The viewer is ready for a revelation.

Pictures:
1. Giorgio de Chirico in his studio.

2. L'Énigme d'un après-midi d'automne (The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon), 1910, oil on canvas, 45 x 60 cm. Private collection. Courtesy of Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico.